Google webspam report: SpamBrain caught 5x more spam

SpamBrain was able to catch five times more spam sites compared to 2021 – and 200 times compared to when it first launched in 2018 – according to Google’s newly released webspam report for 2022.

This led to 99% of visits from Google Search being spam-free, the search company announced.

Improvements to Spam detection. Google said it made improvements to SpamBrain to tackle abusive links, hacked spam, and more. Such as when the December 2022 link spam update rolled out, which was an update to SpamBrain to detect and neutralize spammy links. Google said that update led to them being able to detect 50 times more link spam sites compared to the July 2021 link spam update.

Also, hacked spam saw a 10 times improvement in detection and removal.

Google said it can detect spam faster. This is because SpamBrain now detects spam during the crawling process, instead of after it indexes and processes the pages it crawls,

Why we care. Less spam in Google Search means that more quality websites are ranking and a more fair playing field for SEOs, site owners, and content creators. Is it perfect? No. But Google continues to try to improve its search spam detection and techniques.